On September 17, President Barack Obama was busy playing politics with the American auto industry. In campaign speeches delivered
in the swing state of Ohio he railed against imported automotive
components that are illegally subsidized by the Chinese government. To
cap that off, that very day his administration filed a complaint with
the World Trade Organization (WTO) citing those unfair trade
practices — which totaled $1 billion in Chinese subsidies in the period
of 2009 to 2011 — and their impact on American workers.
Of course, the attendees at his speeches (a specified target audience
including Democrats and auto industry workers) were tickled pink with
his rhetoric. Likewise, left-leaning elected officials praised his WTO filing while the press gave him, as usual, positive coverage. Even Republicans were, in their own way, in agreement with Obama, with presidential candidate Mitt Romney saying it was too little, too late (which still means Obama’s protestations were acceptable).
Critical thinkers and constitutionalists, on the other hand, should
find fault — and lots of it — with Obama’s crusade du jour. His case
against China is almost comical and certainly hypocritical, because his
administration is guilty of the very thing that he accuses China of (but
on an even greater scale). He is after all, the president who claims he
saved General Motors. Under his watch, the federal government
contributed $76 billion to GM and Chrysler (of which taxpayers are still owed a whopping $42 billion).
Those are, without a doubt, government subsidies (especially so as any
alleged loans go unpaid), and the original total was some 76 times
greater than the amount that Obama claims China has kicked in to their
automotive industry.
If any trading partner should be angered over government-enabled business activities, it should be the Chinese. GM’s Shanghai operations rule the passenger car market in that country and GM now sells more cars in China that it does in the United States.
Washington’s unfathomable benevolence to GM (which garnered it the
derisive but well-deserved nickname of “Government Motors”), the
company’s crutch, should be perceived as an unfair advantage when
compared against China’s domestically-based manufacturers as well as
foreign-owned firms operating in the country or shipping their products
to it.
It’s almost hard to believe that the land of the free and the home of
the brave is beating communist China at its own game. But, such can be
expected when we have a president who is as unprincipled as ours. It may
be offensive to some — an affront to the honor of his office — to
call Obama “un-American,” but he is, without a doubt, a
“non-Americanist.” That is, he abuses the powers vested in him in
decidedly unconstitutional manners, enlarging the scope, size, and
purpose of our federal system far beyond any manner in which it was ever
intended. For someone who claims to be a constitutional scholar, he is
anything but a constitutional supporter. He appears to not even believe
in the basal tenets of our formative document. Rather, Obama has
Chinese-like tendencies, founded upon the preachings of the Communist Manifesto.
The auto industry bailouts are just one piece of the gigantic puzzle
that shows his non-Americanist ways. Yet, they show perfectly what makes
the man, his administration, and his legacy.
Obama should have let the deeply-flawed General Motors collapse and
its market share and production be replaced by other players (including
Ford, which did not take public funds) and/or he should have allowed the
legal system to restructure GM under bankruptcy proceedings. But,
rather than allowing the free markets and, more importantly, the rule of
law to dictate GM’s future, he exerted public energy and monetary
resources to make the company whole. He granted GM special favor — even
illegal favor both under constitutional principles and bankruptcy law —
not afforded other companies. The State under Obama’s watch was allowed,
and even compelled, to pick winners and losers in the marketplace by
assuming ownership and management of what once were privately-held
assets. That’s something you see in China.
Likewise, it’s likely that the bailout was done just as much to offer
life support to the United Auto Workers union as to the corporation
itself, a communist trick of the trade that gives labor special
exaggerated powers rather than the equal footing that exists in a true
free economy.
Obama’s subsidization of the American auto industry was wrong on all
counts — immoral, illogical, and illegal — just like the Chinese
subsidies that he is now railing against. If Americans can see the
errors in China’s ways and passionately despise their methods of doing
business, then maybe they can think critically and see that America, or
at least Obama, has been guilty of the same. If they do, and don’t
clamor for change at the polls this November or in Obama’s ways of doing
things if he is re-elected, then we are in for even more dangerous
Chinese-like economic controls as our economy struggles to rise from its
doldrums. And, that is not the cure for what ails us; communism in any
form has never worked and it never will. Just ask the North Koreans,
Cubans, and, yes, the Chinese how they appreciate their ways of life and
"freedoms."
Bob Confer is a contributor to The New American. He is the vice-president of Confer Plastics, Inc. and a weekly columnist for the Greater Niagara Newspapers.
This originally appeared in the 18 September 2012 The New American at:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/12880-obamas-chinese-tendencies
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